Divining the divine: book review

To hear that victorious armies
carried home the heads of conquered gods, only to set them up for worship back
home, makes us realise that holiness possessed its own distinctive currency in
the ancient world. Though their followers died, Gods survived to live another
day. A review of And Man Created God, by Selina O'Grady.

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To the scholar, Selina O’Grady’s tour
of ancient global history feels like a birthday treat: a bit of revisionist
history in which all the children forgotten at previous parties (the cults!
deities! forgotten messiahs!) get invited at last. But what tune will they be
forced to dance to once they are on stage? One feels that an unsettling
surprise may be in store for them.

This continent–leaping
exploration of the intellectual landscape of the silk-road stretching from Rome
to China during the centuries surrounding Christianity’s birth definitely has a
point to make. But it takes its time, weaving its evidence together with the
infinite patience of the good historian – this despite its polemical title and
the illustrative image of Adam zapping God into existence on the cover of the
American version.

This patience combined with O’Grady’s
love– lust almost - for the past in all its detail, gives us hope that
she will really have something to add to the oft-repeated adage that humans
have created religion. That’s a message that should be familiar by now, since
we have heard it so many times, whether as a claim that religion was created to
give comfort (Karl Marx), wish-fulfilment (Sigmund Freud), practical aid (J.G.
Frazer), social cohesion (Emile Durkheim), self-understanding (Ludwig Feuerbach),
or just a sense that there really is something meaningful out there in the
wilderness of the world (Peter Berger). So if O’Grady wants to add to this
century-old chorus, one can’t help but feel that she’d better have something
new to say.

One of the book’s aims is nothing
less than to provide us with the sure-fire, Edward-Gibbon-and- Friedrich-Nietzsche-approved
Idiot’s Guide to creating a
world-dominating super-religion. This is the book’s implicit hook from the
start. O’Grady proceeds almost as if the reader were Augustus Caesar approaching
the oracle to ask how best an aspiring emperor might grab the reigns of
history. Like a diviner with a magic mirror, she shows us the long-lost moments
that shaped the history we know today.

In the opening chapters we drop
in on the Emperor Augustus as he promotes himself to Godhood by way of imperial
propaganda. We travel east with the Pythagorean holy man Apollonius as he is
courted by Babylonian kings; veer south to meet the Nubian queen Candace Amanirenas
who holds power by virtue of inherited divinity; and east again to watch the
emperors of India adopt Buddhism, and those in China a range of heavenly helpers
from Confucius to the divine Queen Mother of the West. Along the way O’Grady
shows us so many bloody deaths and nubile dancing girls that MGM could have
filmed the book with Charlton Heston in a loincloth.

But nevertheless the book’s
message comes through: religions and governments both survive through the symbiotic
alliance of religion and power. This is a pattern that over the millennia in
deserts and cities, among agrarian communities and warrior peoples, between men
and women, and theistic and atheist faiths alike, the book illustrates again
and again. O’Grady’s tale of history echoes the best-selling novel Cloud Atlas. The same stories
happen repeatedly, unknowingly played out by the same protagonists in different
guises. But for O’Grady, the story is not one of struggles-for-justice as in Cloud Atlas, nor of political-conspiracies
as in Umberto Eco’s recent The Prague Cemetary. Here, instead, we have the age-old Marxist history of
governments-hijacking-Gods.

O’Grady is a veritable Scheherazade.
Each chapter takes us to a new land and tells us a new story with the sting of
a political exposé in its tail. And like the author of the Arabian nights, she keeps
our attention along the way with the thrill of the exotic. This book is full of
eunuch priests howling like dogs, and ascetics perched on giant phallus-tips, kings
feasting on tender dishes of tiger loins, while armless boys play the trumpet
with their feet. In one chapter, self-castrated young men hurling their bloody
genitals through random city doors, while in another Rome’s men bestow so many ‘light
kisses on the mouth’ on each other that Tiberius must ban them in order to end
a herpes outbreak. O’Grady’s ancient world is as colourful as any historophile
could desire, even if it sometimes veers into the realm of the Orientalist
itself, with its irrational Indian masses celebrating ritual dances of ‘lust’,
and its ‘monumentally fat’ Nubian queen ‘revealing one pendulous breast’.

But, dubiously mouth-watering as
her characterisations sometimes are, they often teach serious lessons about
history. To hear that victorious armies carried home the heads of conquered gods,
only to set them up for worship back home, makes us realise that holiness
possessed its own distinctive currency in the ancient world. Though their
followers died, Gods survived to live another day just as treasure never dies
but gets passed from hand to hand. Hearing of Pompey’s shock on tearing back
the curtain of the temple to discover that the Hebrews housed a bodiless ‘purely
mental’ deity in their Holy of Holies, we can begin to imagine a world in which
religions were practically treated as commodities to be stolen and sold in the
market place, alongside reams of silk, and jars of myrrh.

O’Grady shows us that divinity
was never so rare and distant a thing in the past as it has become in the
monotheistic modern West. This is a key to understanding O’Grady’s ancient
world, and one that will resonate with anyone who has travelled through the
religious landscapes of Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Bali, China or any other
countries that still preserve the animist religious beliefs that predominated
two thousand years ago.

One will not be shocked by
O’Grady’s revelation that Vespasian was called the ‘Saviour’, and Queen Candace
Amanirenas was deemed a living deity, when even today one finds shrines across
Thailand at which the Earth Goddess is revered together with images of the
Queen of Thailand, the Boddhisattva Guanyin, the Hindu Goddess Durga and a
dog-eared photo of somebody’s grandma.

O’Grady describes the animist
culture of the ancient world as a “jumbling mass of gods”, “merging,
amoeba-like” and competing in a Darwinian natural selection by best fit-to-environment.
In the delirious tragi-comic contingency of great history, when monsoon winds
may deny a proselyte access to the city that would have made him a saint, or
the madness of an emperor may skew the progress of a civilisation, religions seem
like so many Sinbads, thrust by sea winds into foreign lands where they rely as
much on luck as on their intrinsic virtues. A deity carried away on the trade
winds may return home elevated in status, or it may perish.

In many ways And Man Created God is a travel-book; the chapters take us city by
city along the trade routes that wove together Europe, Africa and Asia, then as
now. This sense of a shared landscape suggests a world that was global in its very
fabric (inch by crop-producing inch, and mile by bandit-filled mile), and not
merely global in its virtual technologies and mass media. This is perhaps the
great success of the book, conducting us on our own eclectic pilgrimage through
cities we never thought we would see alive, such as Jordan’s bustling, busy
Petra.

O’Grady’s stylistic talent is in
trusting her historical imagination to weave a wide range of sources together,
making us feel that she really is showing us the past. We smell Rome as a
living breathing reality around Augustus and Livia, stand before the temple
with Jewish rebels, and feel Indian pearls and silks under our fingertips, as
we pass onward over the Himalayas toward Buddhist-Confucian-Taoist China.

But story-telling is both the
most revealing and most concealing way to do history. Occasionally the text is
seduced by its own florid scene-setting, making us forget the point the chapter
intends to make. The book can be a bit repetitive, and many readers may want to
skip a lost-city of the near-east or two. Some of the ideas that organise all
these details can also look rather crude. Reducing the whole of Hinduism to the
Brahmin-dominated caste system, as the Indian chapters threaten to do, is not
only risibly reductionist, but also disturbingly colonialist. The use of Rome
as a paradigmatic case of success can give the book a somewhat triumphalist
tone – surely unintended. And it seems a bit dogmatic to claim offhand that
Nubians under Queen Candace did not prize themselves as individuals. Many
scholars of religion would raise an eyebrow at O’Grady’s use of theories like
Max Weber’s opposition between popular ritual religion and elite rational
religion, noting that such simplifications serve as a sneaky way for the elite
to congratulate themselves on their ‘superiority’.

But the overall effect is that of
the Arabian Nights, subtly weaving an idea into our minds with each new tale. And
as in the Arabian Nights, important insights about human nature abound. Since
the early twentieth century, the modern west has come to see ‘spirituality’ as
a form of therapy – a set of methods for feeling better. But O’Grady reminds us
that religions flourish partly by making demands that keep us invested (like
giving up certain pleasures), and partly by highlighting threats (such as
meaninglessness, moral punishment, or annihilation) that drag our attention
back from the insistent but shallow tasks of quotidian life.

The best thing, for me at least,
about this book is that by shifting us backward in time, it changes all of our
assumptions about the shining ‘modern-ness’ we seem to have achieved after a
century of war and doubt, travel and communication. Globalisation has become
the buzz-word of the early twenty-first century, but O’Grady’s magic mirror
shows that it is one of the oldest features of the civilised world. Does New
York seem the proverbial city of immigrants? One would do well to look more
closely at Ancient Rome and Alexandria. Is London negotiating a new
‘multi-cultural’ religious identity? Consider the solutions long-ago tested out
on the Gangetic plain or in Andalusia. Do Cairo and Tunis today seem the centre
of popular uprisings against foreign-influenced tyrants? One could learn a lot
from looking to the peasant revolts of Ancient China or the angry rebellions that
took place in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.

In following O’Grady’s grand
narrative we see that every divine regent, usurper or prophet dies in the end –
only the ideas survive. And therein lies the secret to immortality, the book hints.
The man who is also an idea may die
and yet live, rising from the tomb to speak again to his friends, and even to
strangers in other lands.

But above all, in a media culture
flooded with access to different ideas, the ancient citizen who struggled to
choose between Isis, Apollo, the latest mystery cult, and Pauline Christianity,
has much in common with today’s ambivalent census-filler, Wikipedia-ing his or
her way between faiths on a laptop in Starbucks, while buses carrying paid-up
Humanist advertisements pass by.

Atheism is just another of the
hawkers in today’s global market – and not a new one, by the way, for it has
existed in India and Greece for that matter, for two and a half thousand years.
The real question for the everyday person through the ages, is how to look past
the state funding and the slick sophism, and choose for oneself a point of view
– or abjure them all for an honest, quiet agnosticism.

In the final chapter of the book,
entitled ‘And Paul Created Christ’, there is no thought-provoking insight to add
anything to the standard, rather crude reading of Nietzsche, Gibbons, Marx,
Engels, Hitchens, Dawkins and the rest. One feels the author has said more
during the journey than she does here. O’Grady is not interested in
understanding the ideas behind Stoicism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism
or the worship of Atargatis, Isis, and Yahweh. She writes with the mind of a spin-doctor,
primarily concerned with charting the practicaluses of the ideas, not the content
that made them so useful. The result is little interest in following the lives
and experiences of the world’s populace through their doubt, faith, and everything
in between. O’Grady wants to stay up on the balcony with the cynical
aristocrats, watching the masses below battle out issues of truth and meaning through
the medium of gods and goddesses, secrets, lies and hopes.

This leaves a crucial interpretive
gap in the book’s attempt to explain the rise of Christian Rome over its
competitors. One of the most telling moments in the whole book is when she
wonders aloud why the first-century holy man Apollonius, so much more famous
than the little Jewish carpenter, nevertheless failed where Jesus succeeded. “Maybe
Apollonius did not have the right message”, she speculates - and there she leaves
us cliff-hanging over an ocean of ideological debate. There is so much more to
say here about the contrast between Pythagoreanism and Jesus’ ‘new Judaism’, or
the other philosophies that fought for the soul of Europe, Africa and Asia in
those crucial centuries from 400 BCE to 400 CE. But O’Grady passes over such
matters in silence to tell us still-more anecdotes about Machiavellian murders
and self-castrating eunuchs.

In many ways O’Grady’s book serves
as a titillating reminder of alternative realities that are lost to us today. The
west might have grown to modernity under the political gaze of a human
god-emperor, or in the embrace of Isis, our-Mother-in-Heaven, or in a cosmos ‘saved’
by Apollonius’ reverence for the divine geometry of the stars – with Brian Cox
as the latest in his line of prophets. There are other histories reaching through
the fabric of this book, wider contexts asking to be remembered, and different
tales that might have been told; all of which is to say that this is quite good history, but not very good history. While it is good to
see so many neglected deities present at this party, they
still haven’t been allowed to say very much… which suggests to me that the whispering
of the Gods must still wield some of their old power over us after all.